Jenna Robinson of the Pope Center did a little experiment. She looked back at the six reader polls that our center has conducted this past year to see what they tell us about the state of agreement on big issues.

She found strong areas of commonality — 74 percent of those surveyed think that women’s colleges are here to stay, for example, and 88.6 percent think that there’s a college bubble (that figure includes the 12. 7 percent who believe it’s already deflating).

But readers differed on some big ones — such as how to deal with low academic performance. The choice of 35.7 percent was to flunk more students, but 26.6 percent said the key is improving K–12 education, and 23.4 percent said universities should increase admissions standards. Why not all three?